As we count down the final days of the year, SI writers are reflecting on "The Best Thing I Saw in 2024" and looking back at the most memorable moments they witnessed in their reporting this year.
WHAT DOES it mean to be strong? Physical power, of course. Strong is rooted in Old English and Germanic words for severe and taut, as in a cord. Strong, as in what it takes to blast one of the greatest World Series home runs ever hit.
Strong also means power beyond the physical. It is the tautness of will. It is enduring a broken right middle finger, a bone bruise and severe sprain of the right ankle and a broken costal cartilage of the sixth rib and getting shot up with a numbing agent in between at bats of a playoff game—all within 50 days.
It is rushing 1,300 miles home to find your child fighting for his life, hooked up to feeding tubes and a ventilator while his body is in full paralysis.
“To physically see your 3-year-old son not be able to breathe on his own, it was … ” says Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman, as his voice cracks at the memory of his son Maximus in July. “I mean, you can still hear it in my voice. It’s hard. Really hard. No one should ever go through that. And it’s just … It was just sad.”
This was the year Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge rewrote history. Ohtani became the first player with 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a season. Judge joined Babe Ruth as the only players not connected to PEDs to hit 50 homers a third time. But if you want the best proxy for baseball in 2024—not because of one famous swing but because of the strength behind it—then this is the Year of Freddie.
“You know, I’ve been through a lot in my life,” Freeman says. “I lost my mom [to skin cancer] when I was 10 and I almost lost my dad to a heart attack when I was 12. I think things happen in life for a reason.
“I’ve never been patient about my swing or something that I expect to happen. I want to be good that minute. With this, you couldn’t have anything happen that minute. You had to wait. You had to wait to see if it was going to work out.
“You had to wait for him to recover. You had to wait for him to eat ice again so he can come out of the hospital. I had patience. I think that’s what I learned.”
Ernest Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms by drawing on his service as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I, when shrapnel from a mortar blast on the Italian front mangled his leg. “The world breaks everyone,” he wrote, “and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
THE SIXTH batter due in the bottom of the ninth inning of World Series Game 1, Freeman did not see history on his doorstep. He was nothing more than a cheerleader then, rooting for the bottom of the lineup to mount something against the Yankees’ 3–2 lead. Then fortune fell L.A.’s way as crazily as lucky Pachinko balls. A walk, a single off the second baseman’s glove, a pitching change in which New York asked Nestor Cortes, a left-handed starter, to save a game for the first time in his seven-year major league career … every ricochet meant history was drawing nearer to him.
Freeman is an old baseball soul. To prepare to face a pitcher, he does not like scouting reports (“because they pitch me differently than what the reports say”) and he does not like video. In 2022, his first season with the Dodgers after a dozen years with the Atlanta Braves, he told his teammates to stop burying their noses in their iPads and instituted a two-tablet dugout maximum to facilitate more conversations. “I’m not a video guy really ever,” he says.
To prepare to face Cortes, he wanted answers to his usual two go-to questions. What does his fastball do? (Cortes’s fastball has elite “ride,” holding its plane well.) How does he pitch with runners in scoring position? (Cortes’s pitch mix does not vary much.)
Ohtani was stepping into the batter’s box to hit against Cortes when Freeman, now two spots away, suddenly said to himself, You know what? Let me have that iPad. I want to look at how he pitches Shohei. It was Ohtani’s iPad. Ohtani had used it to watch a string of pitches Cortes had thrown to him. The pitches were still queued up. Freeman went ahead and hit play.
Freeman and Ohtani are tall lefties who hit for power and average. Watching the pitches, Freeman deduced a pattern about how Cortes might approach him: fastballs up and in and cutters and sweepers away. He devised a game plan.
If I look out over the plate, he told himself, I might expand the zone too much. And I don’t want to do that. What if I bring my sights closer? Maybe that will help me lay off the cutter and sweeper away. Those aren’t good pitches to hit anyway, left on left.
Freeman decided what he would do. He would look for an inside fastball.
Ohtani flied out, though it took such an acrobatic catch from Alex Verdugo that the left fielder tumbled over the sidewall and into the stands, moving the runners up a base. With second and third base occupied and first base open, the Yankees intentionally walked Mookie Betts.
“As soon as [the Verdugo catch] happened, I was like, O.K., that’s an intentional walk, as everybody should,” Freeman says. “You don’t want to pitch to Mookie with any lefthander. So, I knew I was coming up in that situation. You can actually see [on video], I was already in the batter’s box before Mookie even started to run to first base. I just knew.”
New York pitching coach Matt Blake walked to the mound to meet with Cortes and catcher Austin Wells. Bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, the Dodgers down to their last out, most of the crowd on its feet, Freeman was alone with his thoughts.
“I just kept replaying it in my head,” Freeman says of his plan. “O.K., what are you going to do? What are you doing? And I was like, I’m looking in. I’m going to just look heater in. That’s all I’m going to do. Just so I don’t swing at the stuff away. Heater in …
“And then, um … it turned out that he threw it right where I was looking.”
A CAREER .300 hitter, Freeman was hitting .259 after 22 games this year, his third worst start to a season. But like a cork that always bobs to the surface, he was hitting .301 by the time he was named an All-Star.
That’s when the world started to break him.
The three children of Freddie and his wife, Chelsea—Charlie, 8, and 3-year-olds Brandon and Max—all were sick at the All-Star Game in Arlington, Texas, with flu-like symptoms. Max woke up with his eyes crusted shut. On the flight home, he threw up on his father.
“It was like he had some infection,” Freeman says. “We just thought, a couple of days, give him some medicine and he’ll be O.K. And by the weekend, he had no problems. Everyone was feeling better.”
But that Monday, July 22, Max woke up with a limp. By Wednesday, he was not eating or drinking. He was hospitalized in Orange County. Doctors ran tests and discharged him the next morning. They thought it might be transient synovitis, a benign condition that causes temporary inflammation of the hip joint. The next day, Friday, Max had a 2:30 p.m. appointment with the family pediatrician. “This isn’t transient synovitis,” the doctor told Chelsea. “I’m calling you an ambulance. He needs to get to the hospital now.”
Freeman was preparing to play a game in Houston. Chelsea FaceTimed him with the news. Freeman rushed to the office of manager Dave Roberts. He let Roberts listen in as he spoke with the pediatrician. “The doctor is like, ‘This is not good. He is going to the hospital now,’ ” Freeman says. “And I’m just bawling, crying.”
Freeman rushed to the airport to catch a flight home; his father, Fred, met him and drove him to the hospital. Doctors ran more tests. They searched for tumors. They administered MRIs. They gave Max a spinal tap. And then another.
Doctors diagnosed Max as having Guillain-Barré syndrome, which they traced to his illness at the All-Star Game. It kicked Max’s immune system into gear, but instead of attacking the sickness it attacked the nerves in his lower back, just above his glute, causing the paralysis. After five days of treatment, Max was taken off the ventilator. On the eighth day he was discharged. He still had trouble walking.
Freeman missed eight games, more than the past four seasons combined. He was blown away by the support his family received from the baseball community. Opponents, managers and executives, including commissioner Rob Manfred, reached out to him.
“One time I’m sitting in the hospital, seeing Max on a ventilator,” Freeman says, “and the whole Brewers’ coaching staff sends a video about how they’re thinking about us and how, ‘We respect how you play the game and how you are the person you are and those are the things that help you get through those moments.’ Honestly, the baseball community and family that we have, it’s special. You don’t know when you’re going to need the support system, but it surely shows itself.”
Angels outfielder Mike Trout, who was on the injured list, offered to help in any way. “Let me do something,” Trout told him. “Can I at least bring you donuts?”
“Mike,” Freeman replied, laughing, “do you think I’m putting donuts in my body right now?”
On Aug. 5, Freeman returned to the lineup. The fans at Dodger Stadium gave him a standing ovation.
“It made it a little easier to come to the field,” he says. “Because I was struggling so hard, like should I come here? Is it the right thing to do? “I see all that and I’m like, O.K. Yes, I’m supposed to do everything I can. And Max is going to be O.K.”
More broken pieces. On Aug. 17, two weeks after Max was discharged, Freeman broke his right middle finger while fielding a ground ball. Over the next six games he went 3-for-23. Roberts ordered him to take the next series off.
“I don’t even remember what happened after Max,” says Freeman. “I came back, and I was grinding, but I was just there physically. Mentally, I wasn’t really there.”
One month later, on Sept. 26, Freeman broke again. He suffered a bone bruise and a sprain to his right ankle on an awkward play at first base.
Nine days later, at a news conference on the eve of the NL Division Series, Freeman hinted he would be in the starting lineup against San Diego. He headed straight to the batting cage. It was 7:30 p.m. With his first swing, Freeman felt pain in his rib cage, near his sternum in the middle of the chest. He had tweaked something in that area the previous day during a workout, treated it at home and it had felt better. But now something wasn’t right.
He thought, Maybe I just have to swing through it to loosen it up. And then, on his 13th swing—yes, Freeman is meticulous enough about his work to know—the pain exploded so excruciatingly that he dropped his bat and fell to his knees. He could not walk. He had to be helped out of the cage.
At 9:45 p.m. he was in an MRI machine. He didn’t get out until 11:15 p.m. “They diagnosed it as a costal cartilage defect in my sixth rib, which is essentially a broken rib,” he says. Freeman had one question: “Can I play with it?” Doctors told him they would do everything they could to deaden the pain. He kept the injury secret outside the clubhouse.
“People were asking, ‘Is he going to play or is he not going to play?’ ” Freeman says. “It was all about my ankle. But no one knew about my rib. I was trying to keep that quiet because I didn’t want [the Padres] to know. So, we just tried to mask it. And we did a pretty good job.”
Teammate Miguel Rojas estimated that Freeman took a shot to numb the pain every 25 minutes.
“It wasn’t every 25 minutes,” Freeman says. “I really don’t want to disclose what I was doing. But yeah, there were things involved that helped me get through the games. Everything was doctor approved.”
Asked if the injured area was numb while he swung the bat during games, Freeman says, “It was completely numb. And then the numbing wore off. So, we had to re-numb.”
Freeman went 3-for-11 in the first three games of the NLDS. He could not put weight on his right ankle when he swung. His rib was numb. It was too much for his father to watch. Fred FaceTimed his son at 11 p.m. after Game 3, a loss that put the Dodgers on the brink of elimination.
“Quit it,” Fred told Freddie. “For the year. It just needs to stop. You’ve got to look out for yourself, what it means for your health down the road when you’re older. You’re doing too much. It needs to stop.”
His father had not spoken to him like that in years. He knew his father was right.
The Dodgers won Game 4 without Freeman, 8–0, and Game 5 with him, 2–0, to advance to the NLCS and face the Mets. The rib healed enough not to need numbing, but the ankle remained a problem. Freeman didn’t play in Games 4 and 6 of the NLCS. The Dodgers had four days off before the start of the World Series. He made sure not to run, the one activity that most bothered his ankle. When he was announced as part of player introductions before Game 1, it was the first time he had run in six days. He felt no pain. The training staff remarked how good he looked jogging from the dugout to the foul line.
Something else happened during the days between the NLCS and World Series. Freeman found his batting stroke. Two days before the World Series, he called his father.
“Dad, I’m going to hit. I’ve got it,” he told him. “I figured it out. I’m hitting a line drive every time at the shortstop in batting practice. I’m good. I’ve got this.”
“Oh,” Fred said in a flat voice. “That’s great.”
Says Freeman, “It was like, O.K., sure. Yeah. He knew what I was going through. He knew what my injuries were. But I knew in my heart that the pain was in a spot I could manage, and it wasn’t going to get worse.”
THIRTY-SIX YEARS and 10 nights before Freeman had a conversation with himself about what to look for on the next pitch, Kirk Gibson did the same. Both moments occurred in the left-hand batter’s box at Dodger Stadium during a pause after a walk with two outs in the ninth inning of Game 1 of the World Series. Gibson, recalling a tip from scout Mel Didier, reminded himself that Dennis Eckersley would throw a backdoor slider on a full count. Freeman reminded himself to look for an inside fastball from Cortes.
Both hitters, both hobbled by injuries, got exactly what they sought. Both swung the bat at 8:37 p.m. Both hit home runs to near identical spots in the right-field pavilion.
Freeman’s blast was the first grand slam to end a World Series game. It was the first time he had pulled a home run in 55 days. No longer was he broken.
Watch the video again. In the background, behind home plate, there is a man sitting in the first row, two seats to the right of Mary Hart, the TV personality. It is Fred Freeman. (His wife is to the left of Hart.) As the ball soars toward the pavilion and Freddie raises his bat in triumph, Fred rises from his seat. He is the Little League father behind the batting cage, watching his son, looking upward to follow the baseball and doing the quick mental geometry to wonder if this might be a home run. Only this is the World Series.
Freeman pulled another home run in Game 2, another in Game 3 and another in Game 4. No one had ever homered in the first four games of a World Series. He was named World Series MVP.
“I wasn’t swinging at balls, and I was hitting the mistakes,” he says. “That’s all it is. That’s when you get hot for a week or two. That’s because you’re not missing the mistakes. And I didn’t miss them for five days. And thankfully, it was the most important five games of the year.”
EVERY WORLD SERIES has game-changing plays. Only a few have moments that embed into the fabric of American culture. Ruth calling his shot. Mays running down a fly ball with his back to the infield. Fisk waving the ball fair. Gibson pumping his fist. Freeman holding his bat the way Lady Liberty does her torch.
On the day the Dodgers landed home after winning the Game 5 clincher in New York, Freeman went trick-or-treating with his sons along with teammates Clayton Kershaw and Kiké Hernández and their children. Chelsea had ordered an Ironman mask to give her husband some cover, but it was so heavy that he went without it. He was quickly recognized more than ever, including by a boy who after Freeman’s Game 1 homer ditched his Pokémon costume to dress as Freddie Freeman in a No. 5 Dodgers jersey.
“The $100 jersey I overnighted was worth every penny,” the boy’s mother wrote on Instagram. Addressing Freeman she wrote, “Thank you for a Halloween moment this boy will remember forever and ever.”
A few days later, Freeman was in a car hired to take him to appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live! The driver explained how he cried when Freeman hit the grand slam.
Freeman’s ankle is still swollen. He’ll need physical therapy through January. His rib still hurts when he sits in one position too long. Max undergoes physical therapy three or four times a week. His brothers love to play with him during the sessions. His ankle flexion and knee function need more time to return to normal. “Our neurologist and all our therapists say he’s so far ahead of schedule,” Freeman says. “He looks great. He’s doing really, really well. So hopefully, when you see us in spring training, he’ll look like a normal 4-year-old running around.”
It was not until Nov. 13 that Freeman watched the home run again. Charlie pulled it up on his iPad. Quickly the two of them “went down a YouTube rabbit hole,” he says. It wasn’t just the home run itself. It was the many videos people posted expressing the joy it gave them. “After I hit it, we had a game the next day, so it’s hard to take it all in. But then you see all the reactions. When I saw all these people in their homes, jumping up and down, running around their houses, it really is amazing. What’s so cool about sports is that it can do this to people and bring so much joy and happiness. I didn’t really understand. But now to see that, it is amazing. I was able to impact people in such a positive way.”
After Freeman hit the grand slam and ran the gauntlet of interviews, he reported to the training room for therapy on his ankle. Each day he would get to the ballpark at 10:30 a.m. to begin treatment, followed by postgame treatment. He was getting the postgame work done when Chelsea called.
“We’re still on the field,” she said.
“What? The game’s been over for a while. I’ll be right there.”
He came back for a private curtain call. They were all there. Chelsea, Charlie, Brandon, Max, Fred, his stepmother, a grandfather, an uncle and other friends.
“You know, a lot of things happened positively in my professional life,” Freeman says. “And that only happened because my personal life was much better. And that’s because Max is doing better. We got through it and three months later, everyone’s smiling.
“Everything’s going to be O.K. in 2025, hopefully. If not, and that’s going to happen in our lifetime, you just handle the speed bumps. Make sure that car makes it over and lands softly, and then you just keep going.”
Like a braided cord pulled taut, each sinew intertwined, it is a lesson in what it means to be strong.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Freddie Freeman Defined Strength for the Title-Winning Dodgers.
